Yeah the cruelty of it is cool, but have you tried the defiance yet? Hoooly shit. Playing air guitar to the latest rock anthem “grabbed by its pussy” to be re-contextualized for the fash-boys and rapists? Sublime. Have you posed in the latest camo pattern with a submachine gun thingy bristling with all the banana clips and extensions and scopes all over it so it looks extra menacing? Looking like if a full bag of dicks was violently torn open? Maaaan, the rush! To tell all those judges and high raking military members and the boards of venerated institutes like the Kennedy Center to bow down, suck it, and fuck off is soooo cool!
The Klown Kar Kabal has become a Klown Kar Kabaret, but is anybody really surprised? So much of Donnie Darko & Co. is performative—a show of mighty might, brutal strength, American dominance draped in the star n bars, the triumph of the underdog—that the optics are starting to blind both sides of the lens. It bears an uncanny resemblance to the most baroque of showmen: Tammy Faye, Al Jolson, PT Barnum, Larry the Cable Guy, Gallager, and yet still appeals to the most basic bitch, butch built, Plain Janes among us. The show is hyperbolic, exaggerated, pumped up and dumbed down, a spectacle in deliberate cruelty and the preservation of its ill-begotten supremacy.
Some of it feels very…Freudian. Like we’re witnessing a demon that is the manifest psyche of all the injured boys ever, now out for payback against every man bigger, better, and more accomplished. Any man stronger, smarter, and that is kinder, or gentle, and knows his heart and is not afraid of letting it show. So many of the men in the Klown Kar Kabinet fit the avenging boy profile, acting out of a deep sense of having been injured, wounded, disrespected, overrun, bullied, and so mortally hurt that the world must pay ten times over for those transgressions.
Perhaps that is what drives the defiance. What fuels this sense of being so aggrieved as they say they are. The Oppression Olympics, hotly contested moral ground for millions who want to belong to the collective, has always been a niche playground. Competition there is fierce, with the most narrow of defined classes becoming whole personalities to wear, victimhoods to weaponize. White Christian men never stood a chance, at least not until Donnie Darko showed up and gave a sly nod to the 14 words.
This also ratified fractured personas, enabled untreated mental illness to having a final say at the podium. Hug a flag, spaz out about Black people eating cats and dogs, regurgitate lies, ridicule the handicapped, POWs, women who are too ugly to even consider raping, fire up your playlist for a crowd of thousands, do your best Elaine Benes little kicks dance, or the Carlton without any rhythm. Granted, all of this is pablum, vanilla sex, beige as fuck material considering the underbelly this reptile embodies, but that’s the nudge-and-wink of it all, isnt it?
Look at Elon, finally letting the teenage boy in him that never felt accepted show up. The gothy, vampy, just wants a little respect Elon. Waving around a chainsaw (not running), desperately repeating his flat jokes so we’ll finally get it—and get him—trying to make ‘Dark MAGA’ a thing. (That little war cry he uttered was hella kewt, not gonna lie.) So much of this screams of Elon’s repressed side clawing to get out. And look at the color of red pained on the chainsaw itself, what the fuck is that: Bruised Cherry, or Vixen Velvet Red? Inferno Ruby? Rapture Rouge? Why is there so much about these characters that defies the very masculinity they are trying to project? In reality, the shade is more Magat Maroon than Burgundy Boi, but you can’t knock ‘em for trying. I mean, put that chainsaw on the runway in the hands of Lana Ja'Rae, and let her cook. We all know Elon’s alt account would fire off drool emojis and skeet emojis in the rat-a-tat numbers. 💦💦💦💦💦💦💦💦💦💦💦💦
Look at Stephen Miller, the Goon of Gaslight, running at 100 MPH of abusive rhetoric and jedi mind tricks gone splat. The ratio of him shouting, disparaging people, vilifying whole demographics, and insulting interviewers is so off the charts we see nothing of a genuine person in there. Has anybody ever listened to him? As a boy, was he under a constant shut-down, unheard, ignored, belittled, brushed off? His interior life, what is that like? If he were to find silence, would it destroy him? What would happen if somebody simply held his hand and listened to him? How close is he to bursting into tears?
While we are well past speculating how many of these injured souls might be healed with just a simple fucking hug, it’s worth entertaining. Imagine if one hug, one all encompassing bear hug around Tom Homan reversed the men thrown into El Salvador’s CECOT Supermax, restored their shaved heads to full heads of hair, unshackled them, back into the airplanes, back into the states, back into the arms of loved ones. Or, pulling Stephen Miller into this love fest, would a group hug solve immigration all together and create a utopian synergy between all nations of the Americas?
In the least, would these raging monsters take pause, even if just for a second, to regard the violence they are causing?
Listen: I am all about righteous retribution. I am willing to choose violence. I am all for scorched earth, saving the village by incineration. It is a language I can respond to, and swiftly. But even I, hands baseball mitt leathersoft from all the Kleen-bore I’ve been applying, fingertips numb from charging magazines, even I can see these men are in desperate need of a fucking hug.
Don’t ask me to do it—I'll be too tempted to bite off an earlobe—but can somebody step in, please? For science, for the social good, for the sake of demonstrating decency to this rabid fanbase, these Children of the Spurned? Does the world really need to burn because these wounded boys are incapable of healing, integration, and forgiveness? I would like to see, just once, humanity step into its greatness, its full potential, its brilliance and capacity for unity, without the bloodshed we seem to be accustomed to. I mean…can you imagine?